afthermal
afthermal is a driver/library for the popular Adafruit (originally Cashino
A2) thermal printer [1].
Partially, it is inspired by previous efforts:
- https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Thermal-Printer-Library
- https://github.com/adafruit/Python-Thermal-Printer/
- https://github.com/luopio/py-thermal-printer/
afthermal try to be more pythonic and efficient than previous efforts,
which have mostly been 1:1 ports from other languages.
Additionally it is not focused on education but rather on being a
reliable library for handling this kind of hardware.
Features include:
- Comfortable handling of text formatting
- Adapters to print images from PIL / Pillow as well as OpenCV
- A fast Floyd-Steinberg implementation to dither OpenCV images.
- Command-line utilities for calibrating the printer for optimum speed and quality, as well as other capabilities
- Support for printing QR codes via PyQRCode without having to render them into images first
| [1] | Specification is available at http://www.adafruit.com/datasheets/CSN-A2%20User%20Manual.pdf |
Installation
afthermal is installable from pip. It supports an extra feature named
tools, installing it will include cli tools for calibrating the
printer, printing test images or other tasks:
$ pip install 'afthermal[tools]'It includes a C extension for Floyd-Steinberg dithering, since OpenCV does
not ship with a dithering function. For this reason C-modules must be
compileable when installing afthermal.
Full docs
The complete documentation is housed at http://pythonhosted.org/afthermal.
